You ever feel like nothing is going in your favour and that you just feel stuck? Here are seven questions that I ask myself whenever I'm feeling stuck or in a creative block or in a funk. And let's be real, most of us business owners, we feel this way sometimes, right? We feel like we get in a funk.
And we do this because we're such high achievers that when things aren't going our way, we think something is wrong. We think something is broken. And I don't know if it's because it's a dark day outside here in Toronto or what it is. But here's seven questions that I find myself asking myself over and over and over again that I think can really help you. If you're feeling stuck right now, if you're feeling like you're in a creative block, you feel like you're not getting clients, you feel like just something's got to click, there's something not working in your favour right now. Here are the seven questions that I think could really help you. Before we get into the seven questions, do yourself a favour. Grab a journal, grab a pen right now, write these seven questions down and answer them as soon as you finish reading this. There is this huge information overload in the world today, and you don't need more information. You need to implement the things that you're actually learning. So if you're going to watch the read the rest of this post, please do yourself a favour. Grab a notebook, answer these questions in real time for you because they will help you get unstuck.
1. What game am I playing?
So the first question I ask myself whenever I'm feeling stuck or blocked or I'm feeling down in the dumps is I ask myself, what game am I playing? What game am I playing? It's It's very easy. If you don't know the answer to that question, it's very easy for us to just, by default, play this game that our network is playing. Play this game that our friends are playing. Hey, if our friends are chasing money and the fancy cars and the all-inclusive vacations, then we feel like we need to play that game. If you have a friend who's just got a promotion, well, we feel like we need to play that game.
If you've got friends right now who are crushing it in business and you're not, you're going to feel like you need to play that game. And nothing steals joy faster than comparison. I think it was Napoleon Hill. I could be wrong, but I think Napoleon Hill said, Comparison is the thief of joy. And whenever I find myself comparing myself to other business owners or other entrepreneurs, again, I I have to remind myself, I'm looking at somebody else's highlight reel. What people post on social media is just a small snippet of their life. Even this video is a small snippet of my life. When I hit and record here, I go back to my real life, back to my relationship, back to Otis, my dog. I get back to work. I get back to my life. So asking myself and you asking yourself, what game am I playing, can help recenter your compass. And it's very easy for our purpose to start going after goals and objectives that seem to be other people's goals and objectives. But if they're not the things that inspire you, you might find yourself in the wrong game.
The good thing about that is once you identify, Hey, these are actually not the things I want. So why am I beating myself up for not having the things that I think I should have by now when I don't even want these things? When you realise that you can escape the matrix, you can escape the world in how everybody else operates and begin to create for yourself, which is becoming rarer and rarer as we live in 2024. So the question number one is, what game am I playing?
2. If my business could talk, what would it say?
Question two is one I got from Keith Cunningham. He's got a beautiful book called The Road, Less stupid. And the question is this. This is a business question. If my business could talk, what would it say? And I actually answered this question for myself 24 hours ago. I'm going to grab my journal and I'll show you Just so I'm not just telling you things, Hey, you should do this, and I don't do them. I'm not that type of person. But I answered it right here. If my business could talk, what would it say? And here's a couple of things straight from my journal entry.
First of all, think about the importance of that question. If my business could talk, what would it say? What a unique, fascinating question. Here's a couple of things from my notes yesterday. Stop making it so difficult. You are on a path of discovery. Attract higher caliber people. You can reset whenever you want. What don't you like about your current business model? What if you went against the grain? What if you stopped talking about retreats in your vehicle? What if you raised your standards on clients? What if you started creating client roadmaps? What if you took radical action now? What if you get out of your head and into my body and into my heart for the inspiration and look for inspiration outside of the coaching industry? There are so many little things that I wrote here. You can see there's probably 20 different ideas here that if my business could talk, I think would tell me these things. And you have to understand that if you've been in business for less than five or less than 10 years, sometimes I equate my business to the lifespan of a human. If my business was only three years old, and I'm not at 100K a month yet. This is what I see all the time in the coaching space of coaches just driving themselves crazy because they're not at a certain revenue yet. Imagine if you had a kid and your kid was three years old and your kid didn't yet know ride a bike. They couldn't yet shoot a free throw. They couldn't yet make you eggs in the morning. If a kid at three years old wouldn't be able to do those things, you wouldn't reprimand the kid, and you wouldn't call the kid stupid for not being able to make you eggs in the morning because the kid is only three. So think about your business. If your business is only three years old and you're not at 50K a month or 100K a month, you're just beating yourself up. Your business is still an infant. I have to remind sometimes myself that and my clients that is, imagine if your business was your child. Is this how you would talk to your child? Or would you give your child some grace because they're doing their best and they're trying to figure it out? So whenever you're finding yourself, again, this goes to a comparison.
If you're comparing your business to someone else's, understand that the business might be different ages. There's different experiences. There's so many moving factors that you can't see. All you see is someone's Stripe link or how much money they're making or whatever they choose to share online. But asking yourself, if my business could talk, what would it say? Is going to give you a couple of ahas, maybe some much needed ahas that you really need to hear?
3. If I had to start all over today, what would I do and how would I do it?
Question number three is also, it feels and sounds simple, but it's very complicated and it's very powerful if I can answer it. And question three is this, if I had to start all over today, what would I do and how would I do it? I find myself asking that question a couple of times a year. Whenever I feel like I'm going through a funk or in a creative drought, I ask myself, well, if I had to the reset button today, what would I do? How would I do it? What would I do differently? And again, this question allows me to... The key thing here is, get out of my own head and just document on a piece of paper.
If I had to hit the reset button, hey, I could probably figure this out again. I've figured it out enough to this date. Well, maybe I can figure it out again. And most of us, most humans, we underestimate what we can actually do in a year. We overestimate what we can do in a month, but we underestimate what we can do in a year. And anytime I look backwards. And anytime I look at my timeline and I look at the last twelve months, I always think to myself, oh, my God, this would have been a dream. For example, this is really interesting. So my wife, Brandi, made me a plaque. And it says the Retreats Guy, December 2023, $100,000 month. That's what it says on it. She made me this plaque to help me celebrate my first ever six-figure month, which is so cool. It's on the mantle right now next to one of her awards. Honestly, I look at it a couple of times throughout the week, just in passing, and it just reminds me, I can figure it out again. If I had to hit the restart button, I could do it again. So that's question number three, and hopefully that gives you a couple of ahas to play with.
4. What do I definitely NOT want my life to look like?
Question four is all about your schedule or your vision. And a lot of people don't know the answer to the question, what do you want? But here's It's question number four, what do I definitely not want my life to look like? And you could replace life with business. What do I definitely not want my business to look like? Or what do I definitely not want my health to look like? Or what do I definitely not want my relationships to look like? That word is interchangeable. But when I ask myself, what do I definitely not want my life to look like? What that allows me to do is create this anti vision. A vision is something that you're working towards. An anti-vision is something you know for sure you don't want. It's hard to answer the question, what do you want? But it's easy to answer the question, what do you not want? So whenever I ask myself that question, I'm able to brainstorm on a sheet of paper or in my journal all the things I definitely don't want my life to look like.
I don't want to check my phone at this hour. I don't want to avoid the gym for more hours behind my laptop. I don't want to skip out on date nights. I I don't want to miss basketball. I don't want to not hang out with my dog. We know what we don't want life to look like. So creating an anti-vision and asking yourself, what do I definitely not want my life to look like, will again help you just ideate, brainstorm a couple of different things that could start catapulting you in the right direction.
5. Where am I saying yes to others and no to myself?
Question five is for my people-pleasers and my recovering people-pleasers like myself. Question five is this, where am I saying yes to others and saying no to myself? Where am I saying yes to somebody else, where by default, that means I'm saying no to me? And if you find yourself in the last 6, 12, 18 months saying yes to a lot of people, a lot of projects, a lot of other external factors outside of yourself, you may have found yourself being burned out, stress, high anxiety, and just beating yourself up because you feel like you're juggling 10 or 15 different projects at once, and none of are actually coming to fruition the way that you want them to come to fruition.
Well, maybe it's because you're saying yes to other people's priorities and no to your priorities. And I get what it's like to be excited in business and want to test different strategies and different outcomes and different growth hacks. And I get that. Business is meant to be fun. Business is meant to be explorative. You're meant to try new things. I love that. I love testing. I love experimenting. But sometimes in the experimenting, you end up saying yes to things and goals and projects that deep down you know are not fully aligned. They're not a fit right now anyways. And again, you end up saying no to yourself. And when you say no to yourself, I believe everything else gets impacted. When I'm impacted personally, my business suffers. So where could you start saying yes to yourself and no to other people?
6. What’s true about today that I would have killed for five years ago?
This is question six. Question six is one of my favourite questions to get me back into a perspective and just shift my thinking. But it's what's true about today that I would have killed for five years ago? Really listen to that question. What's true about today that I would have killed for or dreamed of five years ago? And when I look back five years ago, I was in a totally different state of my life, my business. I was just starting a brand new relationship with my girlfriend, who's now my wife. I didn't have Otis. I didn't have this beautiful pug in my home. I wasn't living in this house. My business looked differently. So many things have changed in the last five years. Five years ago, I would have killed for the problems that I have today. I bet that's true for you, too, in some ways. I bet you're looking at your life now, and if you compare it five five years that way, five years backwards, I bet you've made significant progress in many ways. And what's also true about that is sometimes I forecast in five years into the future. So I think to myself, where would I be five years from now?
If that's the progress I've made in the last five years, knowing what I know now, where might I be five years from now? So that question, again, just helps snap me out of a funk. It helps put things in perspective. It allows me to look backwards and reflect with joy, with passion. But it also gives me strong desire for what I know I could create in the future going forward. So I like to look at that five-year window, both backwards and forwards.
7. What would I most regret not doing in my 4000 weeks?
And question seven is inspired by one of my most favourite books called 4,000 Weeks, which essentially means that the average life expectancy for most people is about 80 years old, which equates to 4,000 weeks. So question seven is about what would I most regret not doing in my 4,000 weeks? And I have to realize that as I look out this window, there's this condo being built right now from the ground up. Eventually, the sun will go down and it'll be nighttime. And then the same thing will happen tomorrow. The sun will come up and then it will go down. I have to remind myself that we are floating on this rock, spinning in circles, and certain things just don't matter, and certain things matter a lot. I try to remind myself that now is the only moment I can control. And if there's things that I want to do in my 4,000 weeks, if there's things that I want to do in my lifetime, what better chance than right now to do those things?
There you have it. There's seven questions that I find myself journaling, reflecting whenever I feel like I'm in a funk or a drought. I hope that helps you. I'd love for you to drop a comment below with the question here that you resonated with the most, or of a question that you find yourself asking whenever you feel like you're in a creative funk.
